by NI UNA MENOS (Argentina)
We publish the translation of the call for global women’s strike on March 8th 2018 coming from the Argentinian movement Ni Una Menos. The call out is already circulating in several countries worldwide. “Our strike”, so says the call, “is not an event, but a process of social transformation and historical accumulation of potential for insubordination”. Let’s deepen together this process on a transnational scale in the next months: as patriarchy and male violence against women are not national issues, the response cannot but cross the borders between countries, identities and sectors. The flood is relentless, the women’s strike cannot be tamed!
We, the women of the world, are together in a process of existential revolution. On March 8th 2017 we united to take action: we did the first global womens’ strike, a transnational, multilingual, intersectional and heterogeneous articulation participated by 55 countries. We have started to weave a new internationalism. We constituted, as an unexpected revolutionary subject, at a global level, and addressed all the forms of exploitation, racism and cruelty starting from a feminist ethic – with life rather than sacrifice at its center. For us all the bodies and all the existences matter. Let’s put into practice, here and now, the world in which we want to live.
We say Not one less as a mark of transversality that combines the music of past revolutions with the tenacity of feminist struggles. We put into circulation a form of power that spreads like a virus and bursts through the center of political and social organizations opening spaces of democratization and breaking the discourses of weakness; it fractures the confinement of the domestic space; it challenges the trade unions’ discussions; it activates resistance in the field of production and popular economies; it radicalizes the struggle against extractivism and dispossession; it creates ruptures in the entertainment industry; it permeates the artistic fields; it produces tensions within sedimented languages to force them to name new existences and identities, and challenges the control of finance over our daily life. It explodes in the squares and in the bedrooms. Nothing is external to the feminist revolution, the flood moves relentlessly back and forth, encounters the ditches underneath the earth and erupts as an earthquake gaining a new force.
We strike because we are pushed by the flood and because our uprising nourishes the flood.
We strike and strike the world to denaturalize violence and all forms of exploitation. We strike against the cruelty that takes our bodies as plunder of war. We strike against racism and the appropriation of our bodies and territories. We strike to defend our lives and our autonomies. We strike to invent a time of our own where our desires envision a new form of life on earth.
Our strike is not only an event, it is a process of social transformation and historical accumulation of potential for insubordination that is not containable within the rules of formal democracy. Our movement overflows what exists, crosses borders, languages, identities and scales to build new geographies that are not those of capital and its financial movements.
Against the sexual and racial division of labor; against the command of finance over our lives; against the production of disposable bodies and lives; against puritanism that aims to neutralize our experimentations; against the neoliberal appropriations of our claims; against neoliberal pinkwashing; against the sexist imaginaries and practices in the media; against the “punitivism” (the politics of punishment through punishment) that aims at discipline and moralize in our name; against repression, criminalization and the demonization of our struggles: we strike.
The strike is a tool that we reinvent to tear off the fabric of violences against us. The strike allows us to map the new colonial and imperial forms exercised against our economies and territories. The strike calls us to inquiry and activates the resistance, disobedience, and the production of alternative forms of life and rebel bodies.
We call women, lesbian, trans and femininized bodies of the world to spread the virus of insubordination. We call for action and for a common uproar for the next 8th of March 2018: we strike!
¡Ni Una Menos, Vivas Nos Queremos!
